When was the last time you sat knee to knee with a stranger, maintaining prolonged eye contact, holding hands, ultimately imagining both the child they once were and the corpse they would eventually become?* No? Not in your daily pattern? It's not in the comfort zones of our workshop participants who do it the first time either, but the impact this exercise has on them is something they long to discuss at its conclusion. Recently, an African American woman approached me after she participated to attest to the power of connecting to a stranger in such a weirdly intimate way, especially because, as she noted, she had never in her life looked into a white man's eyes for five minutes or held his hands in hers. She felt she had borne witness to his humanity.
Sometimes we get very caught up in our inherent goodness. We reassure ourselves that we are not racist, homophobic, or sexist because we are nice people who don't use racial slurs or demean women. We don't talk negatively about "the gays," and we eagerly proclaim ourselves "colorblind" (which of course no one but the clinically colorblind can claim with any verity). We take real comfort in knowing these things about ourselves, but the problem is if we are not called to confront difference in real ways because we stay safely tucked away in our comfort zones we cannot truly know what it means to see people who are different from us. We cannot fully bear witness to their humanity.
"But I have black/gay/Muslim friends" doesn't cut it unless you invite said friends into your life, your home, your honest conversations. It doesn't count if you don't venture into their lives as well. It doesn't count if you cast yourself in the role of the privileged person doing said friends the favor of your company. In other words, where there is difference, you have to learn to feel comfortable in that difference even if you must acknowledge your privilege, your prejudices, their prejudices, the inequity inherent in the culture, our history, our present. To do so is Un-com-fort-able.
We know that true growth takes place in the midst of chaos and discomfort whether in the process of education, evolution, on the path to self-discovery or recovery, fitness, becoming an adult, and so forth. If we don't confront the people and things that we're uncertain, fearful, or ignorant of we cannot embrace change, and we stagnate. This kind of change takes the courage to not only look into the eyes and hold the hands of the unknown, it also takes the courage to dig around in our DIScomfort zones. Where do we find ourselves averting our eyes? When do we refuse to reach for the hand at the other end of our safety zone? When do we tamp down our very natural impulse toward empathy in an effort to maintain our peace floating there on our lily pad in a sea of isolated tranquility?
That woman in my workshop also confided something to me that day: she had not been prepared for the complexity of emotion that washed over her in those few moments. And that is the point of the exercise. Diversity training often treats groups of people as if they all share the same thoughts, values, emotions, experiences, but we are all unique complex, complicated, flawed, selfish, selfless, and redeemable individuals capable of deep connection and profound change. If we can learn to acknowledge, discuss, honor, and sit with the discomfort of our differences and the biases they engender, reaching for each others' hands, maybe we can actually get somewhere nearer acceptance.
In the meantime, know you were a beautiful child and will make a very dignified corpse. ;)
*This particular exercise was borrowed from acting theorist Robert Cohen.
